A Forlorn Hope
by Flipout6
Summary: War has a way of tearing people apart, making them shells of who they once were. Nowhere is this more evident than Camp Forlorn Hope, stagnant, dying, and forgotten, man and structure alike. The only thing to do is to survive...and hope you get to see your loved ones again. OCs.


_Author's note: This is a one-shot I wrote for a friend of mine for her birthday named (On the site, at least.) Tokyobleach. She said I should publish it, so here it is. Most of our stories are interconnected universe-wise and as such you'll see our characters often used in one anothers' (probably botched the grammar there) fics. They're used with permission, of course, and I encourage everyone to check out her awesome fics as well.  
_

_On another note, this takes place about a month before Fallout: New Vegas and several before Tokyobleach's '_Orange Coloured Sky'. ( s/9136844/1/Orange-Colored-Sky) _Now that all that's over with, enjoy!_

* * *

The heat pounds mercilessly down on the rocks and the sand. There is nary a cloud to see in the deep blue sky, just the harsh, searing light of the sun, baking its subjects below, burning, scorching.

Camp Forlorn Hope is little more than than its own name suggests: a forgotten, dying camp. Sunken faces, dreary colors, battered structures all melding into one sad image, the components fading into one another to the point where the men appeared as objects, the objects appearing as men: old beyond their years, nothing to look forward to but a slow, agonizing death under a clear cloudless sky. Men lay down in the no-man's-land, missing legs, arms. For them death will come mercifully sooner then the rest.

Some soldiers are resting, sleeping fitfully on the beaten mattresses that have become the closest thing to 'home' they have out in this hell. Others try desperately to pass the time, playing cards or cooling their toes in the pitifully-sized stream of water dividing the camp in two. The less lucky ones drearily watch for danger, wearily clutching whatever weapon they could keep in working condition, nearly out of any water to sweat out into their filthy drab fatigues. Amongst them, a semi-famous war hero named Versing. Unlike his fellows, he wore faded green combat armor, the NCR bear, once emblazoned proudly on the breastplate is faded and scratched away, nearly invisible. The Sergeant chevrons on the shoulder-plates are no different. He weakly holds a battered Service Rifle, barely able to scrape together two clips of ammo for it. He'd long since run out of 7.62mm's for the assault rifle he'd usually use.

He wipes sweat off his brow. He takes a sip from his canteen, coughing when the warm water makes contact with his dusty throat. Dying men moan in the no-man's-land, begging to be finished off. Versing doesn't look down at them. Can't spare any ammo to perform such a mercy.

The afternoon crawls at a snail's pace, ever-so-slowly turning to evening. Three hours pass, four, five. Two legion strike teams are repelled. One man is killed, his dogtags collected, body scavenged of anything useful, and then two weeping, weary comrades carry him off on a stretcher for the graveyard, where two hundred of his predecessors lay. Versing leans heavily on one of the sandbag walls, canteen empty. A sentry relieves him. No words are exchanged, only a simple looping gesture and a reassuring pat on the back.

The soldier moves on.

Immediately Versing shambles for the Mess 'Hall', a miserable metallic shack sitting beside the nearly-still spring of water that keeps the camp inhabitants alive. A dozen other sentries all follow the same zombie-like pattern. They take their places at a table inside, a foot apart, giving each other spaces yet staying close to one another. All are dangerously thin, all have dark rings surrounding their eyes. Nobody says a word. Expressions are enough.

With his knife, Versing pries open a can of Pork'n'Beans, eating the dry, disgusting foodstuff with an alimunum spork. An eerie quiet fills the room, like every other day in this hell. Every soldier stares a thousand yards ahead, seeing things that aren't there, things nobody should ever see. There is a sense of tragic unification in the room. Men and women from all walks of life, all races, had all been brought together here and forgotten by those they bled to protect. Any discrimination had died hard long ago. One by one meals finish and troopers leave. Versing finishes his meal slowly and is one of the last out.

The soldiers moves on.

He shuffles to what he vaguely remembers to be his bunk, stripping out of his armor, keeping on his green pants and what may once have been a white T-shirt, his only armament being a .45 Colt pistol strapped to his side. Tattered thoughts vaguely form themselves into words in his head.

_God, I miss them._

He'd left his own friends behind to return here, to visit his family in Shady Sands, to fight this war with the Legion. He'd done it out of some misguided sense of loyalty to the NCR. He'd fought at the First Battle for the Dam. He'd given enough back to his country then, he could have gone home. Become a doctor like his parents had wanted him to. He missed everyone. His family, his friends, even Ferox, his ex-Legion rival.

_But here you are.  
_

Yes, here he is. Sitting by a stream in the middle of the desert, dying from the inside-out.

_For what?  
_

_Doesn't matter anymore._

He crouches down on his knees at the riverbank, refills his canteen, washes his face and his arms with as little water as he can. It does not cool him off, it's too warm to do that. But at least he looks a little bit cleaner. He opens his eyes, which in better times had been a dazzling turquoise-green, full of life. Now they were shells, like he was. Doing what they have to do and leaving time for nothing else.

The orange-colored sky fades to a bruised blue, and finally to black. The moon's lunar light reflects pale on the reddish-brown sand and rocks and water, and the sunburned skin of what few people remain outside. Versing stares into the calm surface of the water as it reflects the night sky, giving him something to occupy his attention.

_This is what you left everything behind for._

He sighs, feeling fatigue weighing on his bones. He stands up, slowly, stretching, and turns around. Most of the fires in the camp had gone out, but Versing didn't care, despite the nighttime nip in the air that was beginning to form. He walked slowly back to his bunk, his heels dragging behind him, shoulders slumped.

The soldier moves on.

His bed, a mattress underneath a sheet of metal taken from a bus, lies on the other side of the camp. Versing shivers at a gust of chilly wind but otherwise pays it no heed. He lets out a pent-up breath he didn't know he'd been holding when he sees his bed at last, at the far side of the row of beds laying underneath the hunk of metal used for a roof. Removing his boots but keeping his socks on, He flops gracelessly onto the mattress, draping his combat tunic over himself for use as a blanket. Through a radio somewhere scratchy, yet soothing music reaches his ears, and he is grateful.

"_In the shadow of the valleyyyyyyy..."_

As he begins drifting off, memories begin to flood his mind.

"_...I would like to settle dowwnnnnnnn..."_

_Morgan picks Versing's sickly form up off the ground and crushes him with a hug, declaring him a friend, someone to keep..._

_Axelle pats Versing's cheek, reassuring him that sometimes in life you just had to 'roll with the punches'..._

_Jackson grins like a jackal, his youthful face the picture of mischief, as he floods the room with a stink bomb...  
_

_Ferox and Versing, share a smile for the first time when Jackson's accused of holding a torch for Axelle and simply blushes a deep red..._

_The sadness in their eyes when he told them he was leaving...  
_

_Looking back and watching their forms disappear over the horizon..._

He drifts off to dreamless sleep.

The Soldier moves on.


End file.
